Re: [Bibulus-dev] Bibulus DTD: An concrete example

[Torsten Bronger]

Halloechen!

"Marius L. Jøhndal" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sun, 2004-05-09 at 13:41 +0200, Torsten Bronger wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>> 
>> This forces the processors to include huge ISO tables, and
>> doesn't allow for alternate versions of the name that the author
>> of the item would prefer for some reason.  I think a <country>
>> tag is not too costly.
>
> I don't think such a compromise is a good idea at all. After all,
> the distinguishing feature of Bibulus is multi-lingualism, isn't
> it? This means it will have to handle quite a lot of
> language-specific nastiness such as this.

Which nastiness?

> Size of tables is hardly an argument nowadays; maintainability, on
> the other hand, might be (AFAIK there are some 250 countries in
> ISO 3166).

Well, that's what I meant.

>> Well, somewhere you must draw a line anyway.  A style that wants
>> to translate City names is very stange in my opinion.
>
> Not at all; it's very common. Having "Florence, Italy" appear in a
> non- English bibliography will be frowned upon by users who expect
> the bibliography to be presented in the same language as the rest
> of the text.

But there is no practical solution.

>> After all, it's not about finding and visiting somebody, but
>> about a tag for identification.
>
> Not true. It's about formalism. Publishers and magazines sometimes
> have quite strict guidelines about these things.

If the guidelines are really that strict, you will run into trouble
with non-hand-corrected BibTeX data anyway.  There are just too many
things with different opinions about.  The only clean solution is

<city>
  <cityname xml:lang="de">München</cityname>
  <cityname>Munich</cityname>
</city>

or

<city refid="de/Munich">

with an appropriate city data base entry.  Both is unrealistic in my
opinion, and unnecessary.

>> There is one thing however that needs to be canonicalised, namely
>> the journal name (if it's a paper).
>
> So how is this case really any different? If canonicalisation can
> be done here -- using the "official spelling", I would assume --
> it surely can be accomplished for names of *major* cities.

I believe that this is unrealistic.  You would have to enforce a
large list of names, possibly even a matrix of city names because
e.g. Russians want their Cyrillic and want to be able to write
something like <city xml:lang="ru">NYC in Cyrillic</city>.  A lot of
discipline that the users must show for a rather small benefit in my
opinion.  So eventually people will just write the city names, and
the DTD must even live with people writing <city>Heidelberg, Berlin,
New York</city>.

For journals however there are already lists with official
abbreviations available for decades.

Tschoe,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus